July 2011 Archives

I love
libraries--the elegant spines with gilt lettering, the glossy new paperbacks,
the yellowed first editions, the faded inscriptions, the drab old Pelican books
with their blue and white covers, the orange and white Penguin novels, the heavy
Atlases and art books.I love the
faint musty smell that invites the mind and imagination to feast. Most of all I
love personal libraries, collections of a lifetime, volumes that speak of the
many facets of a personality.

I loved my
parents' library, now gone, like my father.

In my
parents' library, the Liberal synagogue Service of the Heart rubbed shoulders
with the Death of God. Jeeves competed with Shakespeare for my attention.My father's love of adventure
manifested in Scott of the Antarctic and Edmund Hillary, in nautical handbooks
and Murray's Undiscovered Scotland. His humour came forth in nightly readings from The
Penguin Book of Comical and Curious Verse. My mother's eclectic tastes ranged
from Agatha Christie to Kant, from Jane Austen and Tolstoy to DH Lawrenceand Sigfried Sassoon.

The library
chilled my spine with the Triffids and The Death of Grass and enriched my
poetic spirit with Beowulf, Piers Plowman and Palgrave's Golden Treasury. I
was six when I found Coral Island and began telling family and friends about
long pig and cannibalism.At
thirteen, I decided to read every book in the library, regaling my teenage
years with Freud and Machiavelli, Chlochemerle and Kropotkin, Huxley and Camus;
keeping company with Darcy and Heathcliff. I searched for the Abominable Snowman, traveled round the world in eighty days, fought the War of the Worlds and suffered the indignities awaiting us in Nineteen Eighty Four. My parents' library shaped my mind
and spirit as no school or church could ever do, allowing me to roam the universe of imagination.

Today, I too
have a library, reflecting my personality and that of the one I love. Our
library is home to Rumi and Hafiz, Shankara and Valmiki, Ramakrishna and Buddha, Cartier-Bresson and Ginsberg, Charak and Bob Dylan. Weber's Rocky Mountain Flora shares a shelf with
Blake's Songs of Innocence. As my parents' library was a feast of the imagination, ours is a banquet of love and spirit. In our small house, the great ones of past and
present live and speak through the library, a storehouse of perennial wisdom. They
tell us of impermanence, and that all things, even libraries, like their
creators, will one day be gone. Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svahah!

The trunk springs horizontal from the cliffSnakes upwardPoised between creek and sky.I think of the fir coneTucked in moist rock crevice,The tiny saplingClinging on through flood, drought, snow.Once small and fragileSheltered by currant bushes and wild roseNow a mighty treeOffering lodging and food to grosbeak and robin.Are you too a progenitorWaterlogged cones carried to some rock nicheTiny Douglas-firs shooting forth?Thinking of the trident coneThe mighty treeLife victoriousAgainst all oddsMy heart breaks openSapling of hope awakens.

We apologize for the inconvenience Said the man from Exxon MobilAs the waters turn blackPristine river full of crudeThe fishes poisoned.We apologize for the inconvenienceTo grizzly bearsWho must eat poisoned fishTo Canada geese Wings too tarred to flyWe apologize for the inconvenience To hungry beavers And to thirsty mooseTo trees whose roots are cloggedTo those who love their homesBy pure, clear riverWe really apologize For the inconvenienceTo the two-legged, four legged, wingedAnd crawling creaturesOf this and future generations.Oil spills are so darned inconvenient.